New York - The Novel

floods of immigrants regulated into a less visible seepage through the nation’s borders, the great city of New York still contained in its five boroughs vibrant communities from all the ends of the Earth.
    Some of his friends at Harvard thought he was crazy to want to live in New York. For the city had been having big problems in the last few years. Its budget was in crisis, taxes had been going up. There was racial tension; crime was rising. There were almost three murders a day in the city now. Major corporations, which had been drawn to New York since the turn of the century, had been moving their headquarters to other cities. But to Gorham Master, New York was still the center of the world. As soon as he graduated, Manhattan was where he was going. Somebody might offer him a wonderful job, with a big salary, in some other city, but he’d turn it down for any decent job in New York. The only thing he hadn’t reckoned on was that his father wouldn’t be there.
    He had to admit that, whatever his father’s faults, life with Charlie Master was never dull. During the last two decades, the world around them had been changing fast. The certainties of the fifties had been challenged, restrictions been torn down. New freedoms had come, and new dangers.
    Yet strangely enough, Gorham realized, he had learned the most about each change not from his own contemporaries, but from his father. While he’d been at high school, it had been Charlie who had joined the civil rights marches, and who had made him listen to tape recordings of Martin Luther King. Neither of them thought the Vietnam War was a good cause, but while Gorham was just hoping that the draft might be ended by the time he was due to graduate from Harvard, his father had made enemies by writing newspaper articles against the war.
    At least Gorham could respect his father for his political views. But some of Charlie’s other activities were a different matter. It was his father, not he, who knew all the bands, Charlie who explained psychedelic experiences to him, and who started smoking dope. “I don’t mind Dad being young at heart,” Gorham had complained to his mother Julie, “but doeshe have to go on getting younger and younger?” And during the last couple of years, his father’s lifestyle had caused some friction between them. Gorham wasn’t shocked by his father, he just thought that Charlie was turning into a middle-aged adolescent.
    And yet, adolescent or not, in the last few years of his life, Charlie had had a big success. Having spent years trying to write plays for the stage, he’d become fascinated by television and earned some useful money as a comedy writer. Then, without telling Gorham, he had published his novel.
    The ferry was well out into the harbor now. Looking back, Gorham stared at the huge span of the Verrazano Bridge, and shook his head with amusement. Whatever Charlie’s faults, it amused his son to realize that for the rest of his life, whenever he looked at that huge New York landmark, he’d be forced to remember his father.
    Verrazano Narrows
had been a good choice of title. Not many people remembered that the first European to arrive in New York harbor, way back in the early sixteenth century, had been the Italian Verrazano. Everybody knew Hudson, though he’d actually got there more than eighty years later, but Verrazano was forgotten; and for years the leaders of the Italian community had been lobbying for recognition of the great navigator. When a vast bridge was finally constructed across the entrance to New York harbor, the Italians wanted it named after him. Robert Moses had opposed the name, but the Italians lobbied Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and finally got their way. And it was fitting that the great suspension bridge, joining Staten Island to Brooklyn, should bear an Italian name. For it was one of the most elegant bridges ever built.
    Verrazano Narrows
, by Charles Master, came out in 1964 in the same month that the bridge was opened. It was a novel, but it almost read like a poem. People compared it to a great book from the forties,
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Verrazano Narrows
was a love story about a man who lives with his son on Staten Island, and has a passionate affair with a woman in Brooklyn. The
Narrows
in the title also suggested the narrow prejudices the couple had had to overcome. Gorham had supposed that the story might be somewhat autobiographical, but if so, his father